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If this was aimed at me, it’s misguided. I don’t hate Donald Trump, or anyone. I find Trump’s views and personal behavior coarse and are not things that I could support.
The final straw was Trump saying that he “didn’t know anything about white supremacy” after David Duke came out in favor of Trump. So perhaps it was lying plus seeming to be OK with being supported by a former KKK member.
Also:
Saying that “both sides” were responsible in Charlottesville. I wouldn’t ever support Antifa but glossing over murder by white supremacists?
Trashing a “Mexican judge”, as though his skin color made him incompetent.
Calling Third World countries “sh-thole countries”.
Problems due to behaving in a racist way as a real estate owner.
There are also secondhand news reports of Trump using the N word. I have no firsthand evidence of that but Trump’s other coarse behavior is not inconsistent.
So, because a fool like David Duke said he liked Trump, that makes Trump a racist? Certainly you see the fallacy in your logic there?
Trump never said the color of any judge made him incompetent - I challenge you to find such a quote.
There have never been any accounts of The President using the N word. That is a disgusting word and I would never tolerate it.
Trump never called any country a S-hole. If you look at that exchange, the person who said that is Senator Dick Durbin, who also lied in the past about meetings in the White House. In 2013, Durbin wrote that a Republican said to President Obama, "I can't stand to look at you," the only problem being that Obama officials said the incident never took place. https://www.dailywire.com/news/25817...dra#exit-modal
The preponderance of racism has never been shown and to repeat such claims is scandalous and slanderous.
As a libertarian, I do not view Donald Trump as at all racist. I am a libertarian, but I do not support open borders unless we also eliminate all welfare schemes, which is a major pull factor for a lot of immigration.
How else could we have seen a roll back of the federal bureaucracy? How else could we have seen a tax cut?
First, you must realize that the Kings of Libertarians, the Kochs - want open borders. Or the equiv...in fact, they are throwing considerable money and power behind their efforts in this matter.
Roll back? Tax Cuts?
So, the idea of MORE debt for our children to give you a couple bucks now......appeals to you? Roll back? Are you suggesting that the actual amounts spent by the Federal Government in 2017 and 2018 are less than they were before???
I'd like to think you are going beyond "destroy government by chaos and bad decisions while at the same time spending as much or more than before...and, please, give ME money from others pockets (debt)".....but i just don't see it.
Sessions and Barr and all the others Trump has surrounded himself with are Drug Warriors. You call that "libertarian"?
You do have one part right. Selling 70 Billion worth of Arms to Fundamentalists...that's sorta Libertarian. Free Market.
Overlooking the Saudis murders, tortures and human rights abuses...for money...that also seems quite libertarian.
And this is why Libertarians will never get anywhere...except to generally be on the side of chaos and taking advantage of our system.
I've probably identified as a (lower-case 'l") libertarian longer than anyone else at this site -- fifty years.
In 1968 a lot of things were in flux. Public sentiment was quickly turning against the Vietnam debacle; Lyndon Johnson would step down, throwing the Democratic Party into bi-polar turmoil, a second straight round of racial unrest in the major cities, and most us couldn't figure out what was going on un France. And recognition at the top of the journalistic world was limited to supposed "mainstream" publications and broadcasters.
I was an eighteen year old college freshman from a conservative community, and quickly fell in with the campus chapter of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), founded some eight years previously by conservative intellectual and National Review founder William F. Buckley.
Opposition to both censorship and the draft on ideological grounds was a sure-fire winner on any campus (except maybe Bob Jones) in those times, but most of the hard core within our group (50 at most) took a logical grounding of our beliefs seriously; Ayn Rand, and acolytes Murray Rohbard and Karl Hess (who would author a pivotal article in Playboy two years later, were highly-suggested, if not required reading.
We attempted to become a force within the campus Young Republicans, without success, but the following spring, organized a campaign to enlist our advisor -- a 26-year-old graduate student -- as a delegate to the Republican National Convention (they were elected with state sanction in Pennsylvania) and won. In between, we flouted the underage-drinking laws (a lot less enforceable back then) and sang conservative protest songs.
By the following summer, a clear (and irreconcilable) split had developed within YAF, pitting a growing libertarian contingent among those who could not divorce themselves from "traditionalist" religious- and nationalistically-grounded absolutes. This culminated in a divided YAF National Convention in St. Louis (featured speaker was "homie" Phyllis Schlafly) over Labor Day weekend of 1969. The libertarians (who promoted platform of ending the draft, abolishing censorship in the public sector, and legalization of marijuana) walked out after a harsh floor fight.
Interestingly, most of the libertarian support within YAF came from states and regions which are overwhelmingly "blue" today. (New York, with a formally-organized -- and highly traditionalistic -- Conservative Party, was the exception,) And it was at that event that I met a 22-year-old activist named Dana Rohrabacher, -- he was to serve as a Reagan speechwriter, gain the endorsement of the Republican leadership in his native Orange County, and serve in Congress for 15 terms. Rohrabacher lost his seat last month, but as with arch-social conservative Bob Dornan, unseated in the Northern half of Orange County some 38 years previously, changing demographics, aided by heavy campaign contributions, were probably the deciding factor; there is ideology, and there is realpolitik.
Over the succeeding four-plus decades, we witnessed the Fall of Richard Nixon, the election and success of Ronald Reagan, the unanticipated suprise of Bill Clinton, and increasing polarization post 2000; the libertarian movement intensified with the emergence of cerebral leaders like John Hospers and Roger McBride, and saw growing influence with the development of talk radio. But in ding so, the influence of people such as Buckley and Barry Goldwater waned.
When I was 23, and struggling with all the challenges and disappointments of adjusting to the Real World, it was still possible to dream of a "society without coercion"; Exposure to the supposedly-friendly, but not-at-all-principle-based world of "Korporate" life changed that view quickly enough. But I guess I've retained enough of my idealism to recognize that political and economic liberty go hand-in-hand, and that mature, tested democracies (still few in number, but growing) don't settle their differences on the field of battle, and that after the consignment of both Stalin and Hitler to history's cesspool, the next threat to democracy and true pluralism seems likely to spawn in the swamps of "social justice" and Political Correctness. And the so-called "mainstream" media discovered that there are two sides to every story.
And I hope to keep up the struggle until about three days before my funeral.
Last edited by 2nd trick op; 12-23-2018 at 08:20 PM..
First, you must realize that the Kings of Libertarians, the Kochs - want open borders. Or the equiv...in fact, they are throwing considerable money and power behind their efforts in this matter.
Roll back? Tax Cuts?
So, the idea of MORE debt for our children to give you a couple bucks now......appeals to you? Roll back? Are you suggesting that the actual amounts spent by the Federal Government in 2017 and 2018 are less than they were before???
I'd like to think you are going beyond "destroy government by chaos and bad decisions while at the same time spending as much or more than before...and, please, give ME money from others pockets (debt)".....but i just don't see it.
Sessions and Barr and all the others Trump has surrounded himself with are Drug Warriors. You call that "libertarian"?
You do have one part right. Selling 70 Billion worth of Arms to Fundamentalists...that's sorta Libertarian. Free Market.
First, I do not support the Koch brothers and they do not support Trump. I would support open borders if and when we did away with all welfare incentives pull factors.
As far as taxes, I'm not advocating more debt. We should push for ever lower taxes, but also ever lower spending. If we can only get lower taxes, so be it, but we should also push for lower spending.
I do not support people who advocate for greater drug laws. Trump has just signed the prison reform law and has advocated for downgrading marijuana in federal law.
You're severely brainwashed if you believe what you've just posted.
The first paragraph is pretty accurate in that it jives with my assessment: statists and non-statists. There is no back and forth. You either believe in the social contract or don't. But as T0103E pointed out Ron Paul didn't hold his positions because he thought it to be edgy or cool. He was wrong to involve himself in the State and that is disappointing but he had good points and arguments. Still does.
The second paragraph immediately jumps to the "ends justifying the means" mindset that statists favor in their worldview. Anarchists only value the means.
I'm an anarchist/non-statist because I refuse to make believe that the social contract is valid in a moral or logical paradigm for not only myself but everyone else. A man cannot and does not agree to only fish in a lake 5 months out of the year 18 years into the future from the day he exits a birthing canal. I've yet to hear a compelling argument to refute this fact. I'm still open to hearing one though if someone has one.
Capitalism/anarchy is the default setting of a human being. Each person is born free from contractual obligations (statists disagree...citing the social contract) and their interactions with others are based on consensual arrangements. That is all capitalism is: two or more parties, free from duress, selling/trading/sharing goods & services they rightfully own in a consensual manner. Once a party initiates force breaking this natural law they have appointed themselves as a State with (as T0103E notes) a higher claim on the life of another person than that person has. Again, morally and logically i cannot recognize this claim as I don't support slavery, theft, and fraud...which is what the self-appointed State does.
A free society doesn't mean suffering, violence, and bad things won't happen. They simply won't be preordained by a centralized involuntary authority (the State) in the hopes of preventing/limiting the amount of damage us imperfect humans ultimately do indeed inflict upon one another. States won't violate your natural rights only individuals may violate them. The State, seen as a protector of an individual's rights by statists, is actually the biggest offender of natural rights' violations. Free from the confines of the State each individual can now properly defend their life and property.
1. Your assertion that our interactions with others are based on "consensual arrangements" is more fantasyland stuff. What was your consensual arrangement with your elders growing up? What sort of consensual arrangement have you made with the oil companies who provide you with fuel? You'll just stop driving to work or to get groceries when you decide to remove your tacit consent? Make your own gasoline? Provide your own surgery?
Our lives are littered with all sorts of interactions over which we have little or no control and this would still be true even if we lived in your anarcho-capitalist utopia.
2. Why is it wrong to use aggression against another? Please provide a non-circular answer. I'd like to know the moral source of your assertion.
3. What is your source for these "natural rights" you mention. Why have some "natural rights" been revised or taken away over time? For instance, wide swaths of people once held for millennia that a right to own other people was "natural." And, yes, yes, yes, I know what you are saying as you read this, "But they were wrong! No one may own another person! That violates the 'non-aggression principle!'" Who then is able to properly divine what is a "true" natural right and what is not? After all, many others like you argue that you and I should be able to do whatever we want with our own bodies and that this is a "natural right." Others like you don't go quite so far. Who is correct and how do you know that?
3. Have you ever entertained the possibility that when the demonic "State" exits the picture in your utopia, another centrally-planned bureaucracy will simply replace it? Ever notice how that works? Take for instance how another faction of delusional people, militant atheists, who fantastically believe that if they can just do away with Christianity in their societies, that will all but eliminate religion. Of course, what happens is that when they finally marginalize Christianity in places like Western Europe, Islam just steps in and says, "Hello!" You'd be quite disappointed to see that the centrally-planned "private" entity which would step into that void would be every bit as abusive, and then some, from "Da State."
You can have open borders or you can have a welfare state. You can’t have both. — Milton Friedman
Pragmatic libertarianism
History shows us that when we welcomed many immigrants, we had no welfare state. Today, of course, people are going to take advantage of such a system-it's human nature.
Actually they do. They might not get on AFDC, but once they drop an anchor baby, they get WIC, housing vouchers and Medicaid to name a few.
No, their offspring which are American citizens can get welfare. If you do not like that, file the lawsuit. It isn't going to happen.
American citizens are all equally able to access our welfare programs.
Unfortunately, even farmers, GM, bankers etc.
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